Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair
Like one of those fancy juice cleanses of recent yore, intellectual edition: full of salubrious and often quite tough poetry, philosophy and theology broken down into digestible bits ... It’s brilliantly colored, sweet and astringent, tonic, nourishing and, if you’re unfamiliar with Wiman, perhaps just a first course ... I am quoting too copiously — perhaps the practice is contagious — from a profane, irreverent, freewheeling and necessary book. Readers of whatever creed will be jolted to lift their heads from their screens and turn them to the unfathomable heavens.
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It is as much about inclusion as it is about whittling away. Wiman quotes from, and thinks with, old standbys on the subject, like Simone Weil and George Herbert, and more surprising choices, like William Bronk and Gwendolyn Brooks. He tries more kinds of writing — a section about going to the gym; musings on quantum mechanics — and at greater length. Close readings that might have occupied a paragraph now last several pages; memories of the past are given more room to breathe ... Sees God as emptiness, but it also sees God as excess and abundance. Less perfect than the books that came before it, it’s also richer in tone and texture. Wiman, restless as always, has learned new styles from old despairs.
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My Bright Abyss (2013)...came at the conundrum of belief from all angles with care and cogency. By contrast this new book is thickly frosted with quips from poets and thinkers, a buttercream swirl of name-dropping and career highlights, trading clarity for high-minded rhetoric ... Ultimately much of this book forms a kind of sermon, often leaning on platitudes and moments of droll self-regard ... It never escapes its own self-importance, the gravity of the first-person pronoun. I’d welcome a memoir that brings Mr. Wiman’s musings back to earth, shifting from an elliptical voice to an intimate one, less theological posturing, more snakes and Texas scrub. And dentures.
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